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Raytheon Co. (NYSE: RTN) stock is providing a great profit opportunity right now, even as our leaders in Washington struggle to find a military solution to the growing unrest in the Middle East.

That's because whatever that solution is, you can be sure the defense contracting giant and its portfolio of advanced weapon systems is going to play a huge role.

The growing threat of militant groups, accentuated by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), currently infecting large swaths of land across Syria and Iraq prove that the defense sector is not only a good investment, but a necessary one.

"Right now there are 300 million people on the face of the earth who want to wipe out Western civilization," said Money Morning Chief Investment Strategist Keith Fitz-Gerald.

While U.S. President Barack Obama has tried to strike a less militaristic tone than his predecessor in response to tensions abroad – his campaign pledges centered on winding down foreign engagements and he even walked back the use of airstrikes in Syria last year – the threat of ISIS has triggered a change in the president's typical response.

Now RTN plays an important role in accommodating President Obama's shifting foreign policy posture…

The United States' Changing Tone on Military Action

On Monday, after weeks of tough talk on ISIS, President Obama announced the use of airstrikes on militants in Syria and demanded greater international cooperation in fighting the threat. While at first the president was hesitant to act on the violence that has unfolded in Syria over the last three years, it was ISIS that changed his mind.

To date ISIS has captured territory stretching from the Turkish-Syrian border, across Northern Syrian and into Northern Iraq, including the very vital city of Mosul. The Wall Street Journal described the area captured by ISIS as roughly the size of Belgium.

On Aug. 3, ISIS militants broke through the 650-mile border separating the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan from ISIS-controlled territory and overwhelmed the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, finally pushing through to the town of Sinjar.

ISIS' Rise to Power

ISIS is an Islamic militant group carved out of the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the terror group that U.S. and coalition forces all but expelled from Iraq at the height of the War on Terror.

Left battered from its clashes with U.S. forces, al-Qaeda in Iraq was able to regroup in Syria years after when popular protests against longstanding President Bashar al-Assad morphed into a bloody, disorganized civil war in 2011. The vacuum of power left by the fighting invited a number of militant groups to the fray, looking at the situation not as an opportunity to inspire change, but to destabilize the region and form a staging ground for greater radical aspirations.

ISIS, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, emerged as the most sophisticated and well-organized group. Their goal is to create a caliphate across the broader Middle East, in short, to capture territory and establish ironfisted Islamic law in those parts.

Sinjar is home to the Yazidi religious sect, who the militants consider a heretical group. ISIS drove 40,000 refugees, including Yazidis and Iraqi Christians, to Mt. Sinjar, where they were trapped without food and water in what became a growing humanitarian crisis.

It was around this time that President Obama finally folded, and walked back his earlier reluctance to commit U.S. military might in Iraq. The U.S. eventually provided humanitarian aid to the refugees on Mt. Sinjar, and conducted airstrikes to blunt ISIS advances.

The fight is now expanding, and this one technology, of which RTN is its sole developer and distributor, will play an instrumental role in whatever strategy President Obama employs moving forward.

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